I grew up in an extremely Christmas house, doing the same Christmas stuff every year, all December long irradiating my brain with the strange ghostlight of Christmas decorations seen from across long expanses of deserted stillness and dark freezing cold street, while driving someplace in silence, or alone, or both. My permanent takeaways from that as an adult person are that I appreciate coziness and seek it in my way, I like to put billions of little flickering colors into paintings, and I’m surrounded by ghosts and spirits constantly. Scrooge sitting in his freezing cold apartment eating oatmeal in the dark in a dusty wing chair in his PJs and tripping out over his old business partner’s head appearing in the fire is to me not only what Christmas is about, it’s what everything is about, and I keep it in my heart all year long. To me the only thing separating this from Jonathan Harker seeing Dracula creeping down the wall of the castle, which I love and identify with in exactly equal measure, is the emphasis on the calendar date of the story and the particulars of the decorations.
Just like all other overly self-concerned genres, Christmas movies are brutal for tons of reasons, okay, we all get this. But as always too there are a couple that flick open the worlds-separating curtain, and move backward and forward between awake and asleep, like a man known only by rumor who is never seen, who enters your house via unknown means to eat your snacks in exchange for tools, books, equipment, or candy he heard you need, freely connecting the cozy and the haunted. Santa Claus: The Movie (1985), Shea’la’s recommendation, is one of these. It was produced by Ilya Salkind, a 3rd-generation Hollywood producer/scion, who married Jane Chaplin (daughter of Charlie); I guess he’s best known for producing the original Superman (1983) and sequels, and was based in Paris. I note all of this because it seems like what Salkind was shooting for was “high-budget visionary 80s fantasy adventure” – next door to the similarly “European”-feeling The Neverending Story (1984) – but what came out was a shapeless chaotic-weird blob of interconnected(ish) stories, versions of each of which exist discretely in other movies, piled together into a confusing and distorted overlay, by way of the vision of a producer who probably never spent a single day in the regular world. It’s a soaking wet freak of a movie from the movie’s actual title and lengthy opening 14th century tragedy sequence all the way through to the closing shot of evil tycoon John Lithgow hopelessly howling before freezing to death in outer space.
It really is all here: A “Santa’s workshop” dealing with quality control problems and automation as it enters the 20th century, that then ends up in competition with a Willy Wonka startup in present-day NYC, controlled by a Slugworth who is introduced at a Senate hearing, whose rich niece falls in love with a streetwise urchin, who sneaks into her house to eat food, just like Santa, to whom he becomes the first and perhaps only friend the titular character has made, through all his endless years. What else can I say… other than that the script has no puns other than one that gets made maybe 10 times, the smash cuts between “workshop/set” scenes and “present day/street” scenes are among the most disorienting I’ve seen in recent memory, they do the reindeer roll call more than once, the climactic sequence is bewilderingly and clearly unnecessary, the reindeer are weird puppets, there’s a good Santa self-doubt sequence, Burgess Meredith shows up as an ancient elf wizard (even though the elves are ageless etc. etc.) for one incredible scene only, Mrs. Claus seems to not mind spending centuries indoors in a community that includes no other women, a PBR gets gnarfed in a ridiculous way, and that I’ve never seen John Lithgow absolutely dominate the screen so hard in any other role? I guess just that it’s 110% recommended to anyone who also enjoys “was that all in the same movie?”/”did I dream this movie?” movies, addressed to a conception of “child viewer” that is impossible to understand, that depict alien versions of the familiar world with a non-winking casualness that is itself a kind of dazzle camouflage. If you watch this definitely feel free to @ me.